The present invention relates in general to cloud-management platforms and in particular to user-activity monitoring by a cloud-management application.
An important requirement for today's cloud-computing platforms is the ability to determine billing information for clients that use a cloud service.
One way in which cloud-computing implementations may price their services is to set fees as a function of each user's API-call usage. Such billing systems, however, cannot easily provide accurate billing estimates, making it difficult for clients to predict and compare cloud-computing costs. Similarly, dynamic characteristics of a client's API usage make it difficult to derive and report the true costs—either to the client or to the service-provider—of specific tasks in an interactive, real-time cloud-computing environment.
For example, a cloud service that simply charges a flat $10 fee for 10,000 API calls does not account for potentially great differences in resource consumption between different types of API calls. Similarly, it can be difficult for a cloud-management platform to derive and display actual user billings in real time when the user subscribes to a promotional plans that offers a certain number of introductory API calls at a reduced rate during a particular time period or that clusters different types of API calls or certain quantities of API calls into different billing tiers.
In all these cases, merely tracking a user's actual number of API calls cannot accurately predict the user's true billings and does not accurately identify the service-provider's true cost to service those calls.